Prosper Press Update: Quality, Productivity, Price
Eric Owen
Worldwide VP Sales, Digital Printing Solutions,
Eastman Kodak Company
A couple of drupas back, love was in the air. People had glimpsed the possibilities of digital and they loved the idea. It was going to change the business, change the world. “Offset is dead,” they cried.
Well, not quite. Offset is still alive and kicking and delivering a lot of very fast, high quality work. So that wasn’t quite right.
And there were very few people wandering around at that time forecasting a credit crunch, with collapsing banks, economic chaos, contracting industries, and disappearing budgets. But it’s true that we’re in a different world now, and all of us know it. As business starts to recover, offset and digital are working quite efficiently side by side. In fact, digital is still far from fulfilling its true potential. To me, that’s what is so exciting about this market.
Digital has carved out some substantial roles for itself. Kodak’s VL workhorse has quickly built up the widest installed base of any inkjet system, though it has never claimed to be an offset-quality press. And the Prosper S10 Imprinting System has been an instant hit.
This award-winning device is a key forerunner of the Prosper 5000XL, as it’s the first commercial product to use Kodak’s revolutionary new Stream continuous inkjet system. Customers I’ve talked to have loved the quality and speed the S10 offers – and the fact that they can easily move it across from one web press to another. A 4-inch wide printhead is not a press, but it has been the testbed and proving ground for the Prosper 5000XL’s core technology.
Because of this, Kodak and its customers can already point to tens of millions of pages produced using the Stream system. It is a wholly new technology, and new technologies carry risks, right through to the point where they are pushed hard, day after day, in a real commercial environment.
That’s been done now, and it was the S10 that proved it all worked as it should. As one of my colleagues said: “Great. The inventing is over. Now it’s just engineering.”
What Kodak has engineered, using Stream and other new technologies like ink with micro-milled colorant particles, is a fully-featured, fast, and flexible printing press. We’re working today with customers around the world to install our monochrome Prosper 1000 and full-color Prosper 5000XL presses, and it’s going well. For example, OPM has produced books with a Prosper 1000 press over the past month, recently cranking out 1.7 million book pages and 3,850 books in a single day. As I write this, a Prosper 5000XL is being installed at OPM. And we have presses shipping to Europe and Asia over the next couple of months. Installation of a Prosper 1000 Press begins next week at SAGIM, a book printer in France, while SOS Print & Media in Australia will install a Prosper 1000 Press in November. In addition, the Prosper 5000XL will be featured in Kodak’s booth at Graph Expo, and we’ll be announcing another Prosper 5000XL installation at the show.
As in every business and every industry, plans change. And following an announcement earlier in the year, Rotomail Italia recently informed us of their decision to withdraw from the Prosper press beta program because the timing and requirements of the beta program do not fit with the needs of Rotomail’s customer base.
What Kodak brings to market in Prosper is digital, but without the compromises we’ve all had to accept in the past. So it’s real offset quality. It gives great productivity. And it can deliver offset-style work at offset prices. But if you ask me why I’m really excited about it, that’s not the reason. The real hook is the potential. All this is just the beginning.